| Description Of Item | Illustration from the collection of Alexander Morison. Plate 55 of Morison’s 'The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases' (1840). Unsigned [Alexander Johnston].
'Portrait of E. M., an unmarried female, aged 63.
This woman appears to have been an eccentric character, she lived in a room by herself, employed in needle-work, and was in the habit of preaching to a sect called Ranters; about six years ago she became so troublesome, in the parish in which she resided, that she was sent to a lunatic asylum. She is very prone to theft, and exhibits a considerable degree of noisy violence when her stolen goods are taken from her.
The patients 53, 54, and 55, are in the same Asylum, they are all capable of rational conversation, but cannot overcome the propensity to steal; it is rather remarkable that each of them has invariably a different mode of concealing her stolen goods — one conceals them in her cap, another in her pocket, and the third, in her breast.' |